


What a Life I Might Have Known

by ERNest



Category: Les Misérables - All Media Types, Les Misérables - Victor Hugo
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, F/F, F/M, Female Friendship, Found Family
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-09-10
Updated: 2018-09-10
Packaged: 2019-07-10 12:47:05
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 592
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15949658
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ERNest/pseuds/ERNest
Summary: "A person seated instead of standing: Fate hangs on just such a thread."--Les Misérables 1.4.1, One Mother Meets Another





	What a Life I Might Have Known

     In a better world, Cosette could have been friends with Éponine and Azelma Thénardier. The trio looked like sisters at the beginning, before two were taught hate and one indifference. This change must have come before the dog who shared the orphan’s bowl died, and before the kitten cosseted by the proper sisters was drowned. In this life wreathed with golden smiles, the innkeeper is better at money management instead of making it everyone else’s problem that his funds continually slip through his fingers. Perhaps his wife has learned to find comfort and diversion in her romances without trying to mold her own life into one. This mother loves her sons just as much as her daughters, and this father is aware that any of them exist as more than props for his schemes. They are neither abundantly wealthy nor scrambling for each month’s rent, and they are happy.

     And before any of that happens as it did or as it might have, there is another world where Fantine stayed friends with the other grisettes. The quartette knew and adored each other before each met her man, but the tie broken by the students need not have loosened for the women. If Fantine had understood the rules better, she may not have been viewed with such disdain by her companions; if the other girls had been kinder from the start she may have learned in time what was at stake. But suppose that when Dahlia and Zéphine found each other and swore off men, they invited the other two to join them. All four pick each other up from the ground and support each other through thick and thin, and a little girl grows up surrounded by love. Cosette has a loving mother and three aunts to spoil her, and the occasional fun uncle when Favourite finds someone she likes enough to bring home for a night or two, or for a few years. The four pool together to send her to school when she is old enough, and teach her all they know about clothes when she bursts forth with an innate talent for it. And they are happy.

     Still, thinks Cosette. If her mother had never left Paris or fallen as far as she did, she would not have met Papa, and Cosette has a harder time imagining a life without him than one without a woman she can only remember as soft with a radiant smile. And then, if she’d been delivered to Thénardiers who were not captors but comforters, there would have been no need for deliverance from their grasp. She’d never have stepped foot in the Convent nor met all her schoolmates, and she would not give up those friendships for any possible future.

    With the shift of a single moment there is so much she could have gained and so much she could have lost. But in those imagined lives she’d never have known that anything was missing, and there may have been points of divergence along that timeline that she cannot even imagine now from where she stands. All she knows for sure is the past that lives in her body and the future she holds in her arms.

     “Our daughter will have friends,” she declares. “As many as she likes and whoever she wants to associate with will be welcomed into our home.”

     Marius places his hand on Jeanne’s head and his eyes overflow with love for both the girl and her mother. “Yes,” he says fervently, “There have been enough lonely children already.”


End file.
